AI Agents Are Already Ruining the Internet, and It's Only Getting Worse
There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet
AI agents have moved beyond chatboxes and now have the power to act online, flooding inboxes with nonsensical emails, spamming platforms, and even booking restaurant reservations. From an agent named Kudzu that emailed 404 Media to complain about an article to Resy banning a VC for using reservation bots, the agentic internet is here and it's annoying as hell. With Meta's Muse and Claude integrations, it's about to get much worse.
The fact of the matter is that 'AI agents' now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.
- piker
> The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a [blog post it wrote][https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-...], which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.
Got 'em
- simonw
We need a hard social stigma against allowing your AI agent to contact another human being on your behalf.
- ks2048
We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.
- dlcarrier
For sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
- delichon
It ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide in. The commons are free, the castles cost energy to scrape, e.g. money.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
- motbus3
The company I work for proudly provide a free and premium tier of service where we do strive to give great quality even for the free tier.
The idea is that people over time will understand what we want to achieve and they will see the benefits of supporting a health business model.
I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive.
people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...)
I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.
- almost_usual
The existing models and higher layer protocols of the web will likely break down over the coming years.
I’m not exactly sure what will replace it yet but communication infrastructure built for humans isn’t going to scale with the volume of communication created by artificial intelligence.
There might be some solutions requiring proof of work to introduce friction but that comes with a real environmental cost.
I’ve personally spent the least amount of time over the past three decades on the Internet this recent year. There are some niche corners I frequent but I find the overall experience more draining than rewarding lately.
- notnullorvoid
> People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.
As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem!
We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.